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It started as a fabled gold deposit in the jungles of Indonesia and unravelled into the largest stock market swindle in Canadian history.

Shareholders have waited 16 years for justice in the Bre-X Minerals saga, clinging to the hopes of a satisfying conclusion to a fraud that cost thousands of people billions of dollars.

But hope faded this month in an Ontario courtroom.

In what is one of the final chapters in the bizarre mining scandal, a judge agreed to discontinue legal claims because there is no money left to pay investors and other creditors.

“It’s a travesty,” said lawyer Clint Docken, who represents Bre-X investors as part of a class-action suit.

“It’s the biggest fraud ever and there’s no criminal or regulatory accountability and only limited civil accountability.”

Deloitte & Touche, the disgraced Calgary company’s bankruptcy trustee, said there is little hope of ever recovering funds from the estates of Bre-X executives, their spouses or U.S. banks.

“In the Bre-X case ... there was a lack of sufficient financial resources to continue the litigation and no meaningful prospect of the Bre-X estate making a significant recovery,” Deloitte & Touche spokesman Vital Adam said in a statement on behalf of the company.

The Bre-X story is expected to end with a whimper in May, when the bankruptcy trustee will make a similar bid in the Court of Queen’s Bench in Calgary.

According to recent court filings, Deloitte was paid $3.9 million in fees, with legal fees totalling about $8 million. Only $79,000 remains in Bre-X’s coffers.

Docken believes investors initially had a good chance of recovering some of the money but the prospects dimmed as the years dragged on.

“The claims slipped out of the trustee’s hands. You can’t expect the litigation options to remain as favourable after this length of time,” he said.

Docken believes there is a lesson to be learned in the aftermath of Bre-X: “You’re best not to leave the pursuit of civil recoveries in the hands of trustees. What do they have to show for it?”

No one has gone to jail in what investigators say was a $3-billon fraud that stretched from a mine in Indonesia to stock markets in Alberta, Toronto and New York.

In the mid 1990s, the Calgary-based company claimed to have discovered the world’s biggest gold deposit on the island of Borneo.

The scam fell apart in 1997 when the company’s U.S. partner discovered that test samples were “salted” with gold from jewelry and nearby rivers.

By 2002, Bre-X filed for bankruptcy. The company that once had a stock market value of $6.1 billion had just $5 million in cash.

Deloitte & Touche attempted to recover some of the money by freezing the assets of former executives and their spouses.

Two of the central figures in the scandal are no longer alive. Exploration manager Michael de Guzman died after plunging from a helicopter in 1997, while Bre-X CEO David Walsh passed away from a brain aneurysm in the Bahamas in 1998.

Meanwhile, Bre-X geologist John Felderhof, the defunct company’s top man in Indonesia, was found not guilty of insider trading by an Ontario court in 2007.

Richard Powers, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business, said it is “absolutely ridiculous” that the Bre-X saga took 16 years to conclude.

The closest thing in Canada is the ongoing Livent drama, which has dragged on for a dozen years, he noted.

But while it’s easy in the Bre-X case to point fingers at Deloitte & Touche, bankruptcy trustees are ultimately forced to follow certain procedures, Powers said.

“Until someone is willing to change the process, these types of things are going to happen. You can cry all you want that Deloitte should have handled it better but their hands are tied to a certain extent.

“And if there were money left in the Bre-X kitty, it would still be going on.”

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